I have no idea what has happened to this thing. It's sad, actually. The website has not been updated since 2014 and there is zero news as to what happened to the project. Maybe they ran out of funding. There was a piece in FStoppers in 2013, the year I photographed the thing in Wisconsin. After that there is no news at all. I think the project just went belly-up for lack of funds. The photographer and builder, Dennis Manarchy, seems still to be very much alive and working so I dunno...

Anyhoo, these were made in a cold rain in 2013 with my then-primary, a Nikon P7100. The camera was parked on the apron of a city center, small town someplace in South Central Wisconsin. Daphne saw something about it in the paper and we took a drive out there on the last day it was in town, a rainy Sunday...

Attachments

Because of the insane DOF of a 1/1.7 compact I had to take this into Photoshop to select and blur the background.

This is a real, working camera. The lens alone, handcrafted, weighs 240 pounds in it's lensboard with shutter.

I went looking for the prototype of that shutter, and found it. It's a Unicum, originally developed by Bausch and Lomb, 1898.

Manarchy's camera was inspired by this one, a "crew-served" monster designed by George Lawrence to photograph a train near Chicago in 1900. Manarchy's is even larger, I believe.

This is an example of one of the 2-story high prints the thing makes. Unfortunately this portrait was hung on the opposite side of the building from the camera so I could not get both in one shot, which would have been preferable.

Thanks, Dave. I wonder what's happened to it since the project seems to have fizzled. The whole thing was handcrafted from the wheels up and it's a beautiful piece of art. Seems a shame if it just gathers dust or is scrapped.

Thanks, Steve, but I was already familiar with these, and of the first three the latest one dates 2014 with no updates. I've looked all over Pinterest (where nothing ever seems to be dated! Curses!) and can't find anything dated as recently as Jan 19, 2018. My sense is that there has been no news of the project since 2014. It was sitting on that apron in the rain where I photographed it in 2013. I can't imagine that the news would utterly dry up unless there were, in fact, no news. Can you clarify that date on Pinterest?

Thanks, Steve, but I was already familiar with these, and of the first three the latest one dates 2014 with no updates. I've looked all over Pinterest (where nothing ever seems to be dated! Curses!) and can't find anything dated as recently as Jan 19, 2018. My sense is that there has been no news of the project since 2014. It was sitting on that apron in the rain where I photographed it in 2013. I can't imagine that the news would utterly dry up unless there were, in fact, no news. Can you clarify that date on Pinterest?

The date was from a Google Search, but I had not thought to dig any further. It's a loss. S-

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